Antoine Mouton (Moutoni), Charity
Made of terracotta, a frequent material of ancient sculptors, this 18th century sculpture at first glance seems Roman, with the attention paid to drapery and rendering of bodily anatomy. Further, the sculpture references Roman Charity, a famous story in which a woman, Pero, breastfeeds her father in secret after he is sentenced to death. Impressed by her charity, the authorities release her father.
Thus began the Roman association of motherhood with charity, and subsequently, depictions of mothers breastfeeding became a shorthand symbol for the giving nature of women. This association would later be mapped onto the Virgin Mary, but the Enlightenment ushered in an era of increased secularization, and Mouton eschews Mary-as-charity and instead mines history for a pre-Christian depiction of motherhood.
Western societies often demand a docile, virtuous selflessness from women that perhaps originates from these stories. Further, this characterization of the nature of women was legitimized by Christianity and reinforced by the unmatched amount of depictions of Virgin and Child rendered over the centuries. Mouton imbues this image of women as the pinnacle of selflessness with a new authority at a time when people began to question religion by tying it to the Roman world, which served as an inspiration to the Enlightenment thinkers of the day.